Shadow of a naked singularity without photon sphere

Abstract

It is generally believed that the shadows of either a black hole or naked singularity arise due to photon spheres developing in these spacetimes. Here we propose a new spherically symmetric naked singularity spacetime solution of Einstein equations which has no photon sphere, and we show that the singularity casts a shadow in the absence of the photon sphere. We discuss some novel features of this shadow and the lightlike geodesics in this spacetime. We compare the shadow of the naked singularity here with shadows cast by Schwarzschild black hole and the first type of Joshi-Malafarina-Narayan (JMN1) naked singularity, where for the last two spacetimes the shadow is formed due to the presence of a photon sphere. It is seen, in particular, that the size of shadow of the singularity is considerably smaller than that of a black hole. Our analysis shows that the shadow of this naked singularity is distinguishable from the shadow of a Schwarzschild black hole and the JMN1 naked singularity. These results are useful and important in the context of recent observations of shadow of the M87 galactic center.